Fujitsu announces successor to its Arm-based A64FX data center CPU

What simply occurred? Through the ActivateNow: Expertise Summit held on the Laptop Historical past Museum in California final week, a Fujitsu consultant off-offhandedly talked about an upcoming Arm-based CPU slated for 2027 that caught the eye of some within the viewers. The Register pressed the corporate for extra particulars and realized it was growing a successor to the A64FX codenamed Monaka.

Fujitsu launched its first Arm-based high-performance compute (HPC) CPU in 2019. The bluntly-named A64FX has 48 processor cores clocked round 2GHz and 4 extra assistant cores. It has 32 GB of onboard HBM2 and lots of extra HPC options together with 512-bit scalable vector extensions (SVEs). Virtually 160,000 A64FXs energy the Fugaku supercomputer, which was the quickest supercomputer on the earth from 2020 to 2022 when it was succeeded by the Epyc-powered Frontier.

Monaka “could have a wider vary of options and can show extra power environment friendly” than the A64FX, a spokesperson informed The Register. “The vary of potential functions is wider than that of the A64FX, which has particular traits (eg, interconnects) particular to Fugaku.” A few of these traits embody the Tofu interconnect D material and the restrict of 32 GB of reminiscence, which may’t be expanded.

Vitality effectivity is a precedence within the design of Monaka. Fujitsu emphasizes its “overwhelming power effectivity” that can “contribute to the belief of a carbon-neutral and sustainable society” in its supplies. The corporate hopes that the CPU will probably be at the least 70 % sooner than its opponents in AI and HPC workloads whereas being twice as environment friendly.

Japan’s New Vitality and Industrial Expertise Growth Organisation (NEDO) is encouraging and supporting Fujitsu in its endeavors to create extra energy-efficient processors as a part of its plan to scale back the power consumption of knowledge facilities in Japan by 40 % by 2030. As a part of the initiative, Fujitsu can also be contributing to the co-development of different energy-efficient applied sciences, together with low-power accelerators and photonics-based community interface controllers (NICs).

Arm-based processors are proving to be a well-liked decide in international locations that incentivize sustainability. Arm processors are intrinsically extra environment friendly than x86 alternate options, with Amazon, Google, and Nvidia all investing of their utility to HPC workloads proper now.